A world in motion from Francis Alÿs

Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs is a restless spirit. His works vary from films capturing his eccentric journeys around his adopted home town, Mexico City, to tiny, quietly surreal paintings.

He can shift from comedy to poetry and political commentary, sometimes within a single work. But as this survey shows, over 20 years he has produced a consistently convincing and absorbing body of work.

Alÿs moved to Mexico City in the late Eighties, and much of the first half of the show features films which capture Alÿs finding his way around, mapping his new home, capturing the unique textures of this hectic metropolis. He pushes a block of ice around its streets until it melts, drags behind him a magnetic dog-shaped construction which collects street detritus, and walks through the metropolis with a loaded gun.

Shown with associated drawings and objects, the sequence of films is tightly orchestrated, and sounds — church bells, traffic hum, wailing sirens — leak from each of the rooms to create an appropriately chaotic urban atmosphere. There are light touches of social commentary — a hypnotic film in which Alÿs leads sheep around a flagpole in the Mexican capital’s main square evokes a moment in 1968, when bureaucrats brought to the square to back the government against student protestors bleated like sheep in defiance.

Silencio (2003–2010), an installation featuring a floor covered in multicoloured rubber mats with an image of a finger being pressed to lips, acts like a pause at the midway point of the show, and gives way to the looser and more uneven second half of the show. Two recent films, Ricochet and Sandcastles (both 2008), are charming visions of children at play but lack the bite that makes Alÿs’s earlier films so compelling. But Tornado (2000–10), Alÿs’s most recent work, is the best in the show. It follows the breathless artist as he repeatedly runs towards tornadoes, camera in hand, attempting to penetrate their reportedly peaceful centre only to be thrown around, sandblasted by the dust whipped up in the storm.

It is thrilling and often hilarious, a metaphor for our search for utopia and, I think, for an artist’s search for perfection.Until Sept 5 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)

Francis Alys: A Story of Deception Tate Modern Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG